This enterprise sets course for a starship

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Saturday September 15, 2012 12:13 PM

Never mind the constraints of the miserable present: the shrinking budgets, the lost
opportunities, the collapsing morale. Thinking is free, so let’s think really big. Let’s think
about building a starship in the year 2112.

Well, I’ve been thinking about that for decades, actually, but that was just wishful thinking.
Now there’s a whole organization for thinking about it, with a proper budget and government support
and participation by private enterprise, and this week they’re holding a public conference in
Houston: the first symposium of the 100 Year Starship Initiative.

The sessions have ambitious titles: “Time and Distance Solutions”; “The Mission: Human, Robotic
or Reconstituted?”; “Destinations and Habitats”; “Becoming an Interstellar Civilization.” But the
organizers also realize that this project will take as long as building a Gothic cathedral: one
session is simply called “Research Priorities for the First 10 of 100 Years.” Then they’ll have to
set priorities for the next 10 years, and the next, and the next.

The 100YSS, as it’s known, would probably not exist if the professionals interested in space
flight had really challenging near-space projects to work on. They don’t: one American space
scientist described the current American space program, and indeed those of its rivals elsewhere,
as “trying to finish what we started in the 1960s.” Low-orbit operations are vital, but they are
not inspiring.

Some of these frustrated professionals work at NASA and the Defense Advanced Research Projects
Agency, so there is official support for thinking big. There’s not much money: DARPA gave the
100YSS only half a million dollars of seed money (out of its $3 billion budget), but then nobody is
planning to build expensive hardware now. They just want to think about what kind of hardware (and
software) would be needed to go to the stars.

So appoint a charismatic former astronaut to lead the organization — Dr. Mae Jemison, the first
African-American woman in space — and make sure that both private business and potential
international partners feel comfortable with the approach. It’s a natural area for international
cooperation; there are probably never going to be rival national starship programs. Add a truckload
of ambition, a pinch of hard-nosed realism, and stir.

The first public outing for this enterprise is the symposium in Houston, and its popular appeal
is obvious. It’s a heady thought that this may be where the future course of human history is set,
and at this stage nobody has to deal with dreary things like budgets and project management. The
most outrageous concepts can be welcomed, examined and pursued or rejected. But is there any
realistic prospect that human beings could ever build a starship?

Building a starship would therefore require not just four or five generations of technological
revolutions. It would also require the overturning, or at least the wholesale reinterpretation, of
the laws of physics as currently understood. Last time around, it took about five centuries, say
from 1450 to 1950, to get through a comparable scale of change in technology and physics. But of
course things move much faster now.

At any rate, it’s hard to see what harm the 100YSS could do, even if it never achieves its
objective. If the history of space flight up to now is any guide, at the very least it would
produce radically new technologies that have major positive impacts on human welfare. And if it
actually succeeded? That would be the biggest deal in human history.

Gwynne Dyer is a London-based independent journalist whose articles are published in 45
countries.